Education bill to foster nationalism, human values

Education bill to foster nationalism, human values

Edith Hartanto and Novan Iman Santosa, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Many wonder why young Indonesians today fail to reach the level
of intellectual capacity that the youth had during the era of
their founding fathers.

Sukarno, Hatta or Sjahrir were towering intellectuals in their
young age during the Dutch colonial period.

Yet, since that time there has been a steady decline, which
begs the question of what is the goal of education? Has the
ongoing deliberation of the National Education System bill set
the right guidelines for a better education system?

The aim of education, according to the bill, is to "develop
participants' potential to believe and be faithful to one God,
and to being healthy, competent, skilled, creative, independent,
aesthetic, democratic, responsible people with civic and
nationalistic sensibilities."

Noted educator Arief Rachman who helped draft the bill said
the basic question underlying the bill was whether we want to
measure the brains or the person as a human being.

"What happened in the past few decades since the fall of
Sukarno in 1966 is that the state overlooked the development of
the spiritual aspect of education which has to go side by side
with academics and the achievement of knowledge," he said.

Mochtar Buchori, another prominent educator, said education
should be directed at creating a generation capable of recreating
a new generation by forging a sense of nationalism.

"Our founding fathers, such as Wahidin Sudirohusodo, are a
perfect example of how a generation could create a new
generation," he said, "the year 1928 was the start of our
nationhood while our independence in 1945 was the start of our
nation state."

Wahidin founded the Boedi Oetomo student movement in 1908
which led to a monumental historic achievement in the 1928 Youth
Pledge in which youths from various ethnic groups pledged to set
up one country and one nation with one language: Indonesian.

Following Sukarno's downfall, the country's orientation was
more on economic growth, Arief said.

"Thus education has been perceived as a means to achieve
academic goals based on knowledge and technology, casting aside
the humanity aspect, the spiritual faculty and social aspects,"
he said.

Values of nationalism, citizenship, humanity, aestheticism and
democracy so far have been conveyed in the form of text book
presentations rather than practical implementation.

"Students are ordered to memorize facts about certain values
from books and not by actually behaving and practicing those
themselves. Under such a system, we have created some awkward
generations... who are not proud of their identity and who have
lost their sense on nationalism," Arief said.

Mochtar, who is also a legislator from the Indonesian
Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI Perjuangan) faction, said the
success of the Dutch education system in creating nationalists
was "an unintended result" because the system allowed students to
expand upon the facts and intellectually contemplate things in
the context of history and other things.

"The Dutch colonial power never included nationalism for
Indonesian students in its curriculum but still our founding
fathers got some of it.

"They acquired it thanks to their solid education which
emphasized intellectual capacity and thought. And they learned
and understood foreign languages and history, not merely
memorizing the chronology," he said.

In the immediate past, the catch word for education was to
create a "whole human being".

The phrase may have become a household name in Soeharto's
years but not many people were sure about what it really meant.
The result was a constant change in education policy each time a
new minister took over.

One of the most recent examples was the "link and match"
policy in which universities were geared to answer the demand of
industry.

The only way to make a breakthrough in this false policy is to
set up a balanced education, Arief said.

"The current bill has attempted to offset this defect by
giving more room for humanities and spiritual education apart
from the scientific knowledge," he said.

Arief said that the younger generation are incomparable to
that of Sukarno-Hatta era.

"Sukarno and Hatta were born in a different time of history
with different challenges. They're men of history, and that era
will never reoccur," Arief said.